The new Gibson Center for the Arts doesn’t just change the campus – it changes Washington College. Really, it changes Chestertown.
Now there are New York-class venues for concerts, dance, plays, lectures and art shows, all in one handsome structure at the heart of the grounds, a focal point of campus life and, also, a cultural showcase for the upper Eastern Shore.
The Gibson Center, redesigned, rebuilt and greatly reconfigured at a $24 million cost, is a place where artists will want to be. Washington College faculty and administrators largely agree it should be easier to recruit artistically inclined students.
“You should see the students eyes light up when they come in and see this,” says Dale Daigle, chair of the drama department.
It may become easier to attract top professional performers to Chestertown, too. There is a platform, now, for instance, suitable for the grand jetes and pirouettes of The Washington Ballet, which hasn’t come here in almost two decades and complained when it was here about the deadness of the stage in the now-replaced Tawes Theater.
Part of the magic of today’s Gibson Center is in thinking back, to what it was.
Old Tawes Theater, which could seat 575 people, extended some 40 feet farther back than it’s replacement, the new Decker Auditorium. It was drab and cavernous. As Daigle puts it, people sitting at the back of Tawes were so far from the stage, “They might as well have been in Worton.”
Decker is smaller, will accommodate fewer, but every seat has a clear view of the stage. The arrangement feels intimate. Decker can seat audiences of 450, 350 or 250. The walls don’t move. But, just with lighting adjustments, sections of seats can be blacked out or lit up to effectively shrink or expand space to handle the turnout.
There are mezzanine box seats in Decker suitable for distinguished guests. And lounges for them before appearances, a “green room” for performers to prepare and rest in, and dressing rooms, practice studios and classrooms for both music and drama students, a set design shop.
And the lobby, with actual, natural light. And wiggly walls (more on that later). Here is, at last, a place in Chestertown large enough, elegant enough, to accommodate the fanciest soirees.
Leading tours of Gibson Center has become a part of Daigle’s job this semester, and his pride in it is palpable. His favorite part is something that didn’t exist in the old arts center. It’s the new Tawes, moved to another part of the building, and shrunk to 140 seats.
This is the experimental theater. It’s for smaller productions, for acting classes. The walls are black. The atmosphere is arts-industrial. Daigle points out the seats bracket the stage and are tiered above it. For all the post-modern look of it, he notes the proximity of audience to performers and their elevation recalls something of the close surround of the Globe Theater of Shakespeare’s time.
“This is the theater I worked all my career to build,” he says.
Down a hallway is the new 1,200-square foot Kohl Gallery, funded by Washington College parents Ben and Judy Kohl. This is the college’s first climate-controlled art gallery. It has security devices required to host significant traveling exhibitions. It’s so secure on this day that Daigle can’t open its door.
Last stop is the 200-seat Hotchkiss Recital Hall. This acoustically enhanced high-ceilinged room, paneled in blond wood that glows in the light from high windows is, actually, something of a fine musical instrument itself and pretty as a violin.
Daigle laughs at his guests’ response on walking into the room: “That’s what everybody does when they come in. They go, Oh My God.”
Remember the old arts center? How you’d park in back? Then you had to walk all the way around the dark exterior to the front to get in?
The architects had a brilliant solution. You can only scratch your head at why it wasn’t thought of before. They put in something called a back door.
And here’s a fun part. The corridor leading from the rear to the front lobby takes you along an interior wall that is smooth and undulating. Like a dance. The colors of it change as you go along from orange to yellow. Heck, it’s so classy, make that change from umber to ochre.
Why does the wall curve this way and that way?
To make you smile.
Arts projects are a focus of the architectural firm of GWWO of Baltimore. They have done theater, music and art projects at Bowdoin College, Princeton University, Shepherd University, Montgomery College and Maryland Institute College of Art. Daigle says, “They asked us what we wanted. They actually listened to us. They said no sometimes. They got a lot right.”
The grand opening is Thursday, Oct. 1, a special patrons dinner for major donors and members of the Board of Visitors and Governors. Guests will preview “Second Nature: Masterpieces of 19th Century Landscape Painting” in the Kohl gallery.
Singer Sue Matthews, accompanied by pianist Robert Redd, will perform “The American Songbook.”
This one is, sorry to say, by invitation only.
But, public take note: there are a number of stellar events during grand opening celebration weekend that are open for everyone.
On Friday, Oct. 2, at 3:30 p.m. is the fall convocation in Decker, honoring Broadway director and scriptwriter Mark Bramble, art historian Linda Nochlin and Grammy-winning songwriter and singer Tom Paxton. And playwrite Stephen Spotswood will get the very first Alumni Horizon Ribbon Award. A gala reception follows. At 8 p.m. the drama department stages the hilarious Irish Play, Tick My Box, in the Tawes experimental theatre.
On Saturday, Oct. 3, at 8 p.m., in Decker, musician Chad Stokes headlines an evening of entertainment. Comedy Central’s Kyle Cease emcees the show. Illusionist Mike Super casts his spell on the audience. Gabriela Garcia Medina reads from her poetry.
On Sunday, Oct. 4., at 3 p.m., in Hotchkiss Recital Hall, the Washington College Concert Series opens its 58th season with a performance by the Brentano String Quartet. Tickets are available at the Gibson ticket office.
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